Author Guidelines

Thank you for choosing to submit your paper to us. These instructions will ensure we have everything required so your paper can move through peer review, production and publication smoothly. Please take the time to read and follow them as closely as possible, as doing so will ensure your paper matches the journal's requirements.

The Editorial Office is pleased to answer any questions you may have about preparing your manuscript in accordance with our guidelines.

Email: editorialoffice@vtejournal.com

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Vocation, Technology & Education（VTE, ISSN 3005-2157) is an international, open-access academic journal sponsored by Shenzhen Polytechnic University. VTE is published quarterly in English and delivers high quality, peer-reviewed research. It is dedicated to fostering a vibrant and inclusive academic community, advocating for diverse perspectives, and prioritizing innovative ideas.

VTE is founded on the core of education, technology, and professions, focusing on their interplay and interconnections. We engage in theoretical and empirical research in various fields such as applied higher education, vocational education, continuing education, vocational sociology, technology studies, history of science and technology, and technology policy. We place particular emphasis on the application of emerging technologies, such as the impact of digital technologies on the structure and formation of skills, and the skill development within emerging professional groups.

Our aim is to provide sound and comprehensive theoretical references for the promotion of technically qualified talents through research in these academic fields:

-Global Trends and Practices in Vocational Education;

-Approach to Cultivating High-Quality Applied Talent;

-Innovation and Best Practices in Vocational Education;

-The Integration of Technological Innovation and Education;

-The Impact of Science and Technology Policies on Education.

How the Editorial Team deals with your submission—please read carefully as this contains important information for you

To ensure that the Editorial Team is able to dedicate sufficient time to making sure that each manuscript under consideration receives the attention it deserves, the Journal has adopted a two-stage selection process.

In stage one, the Editor-in-Chief will make the initial assessment of the potential and relevance of the manuscript. This will be based on the Journal objectives as stated in the Aims and Scope section with the primary questions being:

• Does this article contribute to either theoretical advancement and/or to potentially informing policy and practice in vocational education/technology study/higher education?
• Is the article appropriately grounded in vocational education/technology study/higher education literature?
• Will this article be of interest to our international and diverse audience?
• Is the article within the journal’s word limit and does it meet other technical requirements?

Manuscripts that do not clearly meet these minimum expectations will be desk rejected.

The abstract: To facilitate the initial assessment of your manuscript, please ensure that the abstract clearly communicates the contributions, approach, and significance of the study. While the initial review will consider the full manuscript, an unclear abstract may be a reason for desk rejection if it hinders the ability of editors and reviewers to understand the nature of the study.

If your manuscript proceeds to stage two, it will be sent on to one of the Associate Editors for closer scrutiny. They will undertake a more detailed look at the manuscript, assessing its theoretical foundations, implications for policy and practice, methodological soundness, and conclusions, including the broader significance of the study. If they feel that your contribution addresses these aspects in sufficient depth, with clarity and rigour, they will then select appropriate peer reviewers and send the manuscript out for full expert review. If their assessment is negative, the manuscript will be rejected at this point in stage two.

Reviewer selection is a carefully constructed process to ensure that, if your paper gets to the review stage, it will receive at least two expert, anonymous, independent peer reviews.

In the case of rejection, at either stage, we aim to let you know within four weeks of our decision so that you may seek an alternative publication outlet. We believe a quick process is in the interest of all concerned.

JOURNAL POLICIES

Peer review

VTE operates a double-blind external peer review process. We invite worldwide experts in the relevant field to make a double-blind peer review of manuscripts submitted by authors. Review comments are fully considered to ensure the academic value of the journal. The primary task of reviewers is to evaluate the validity of the approach, the significance and originality of the finding, its interest and timeliness to the scientific community, and the clarity of the writing. A qualified peer reviewer should send his/her feedback (even decline to review due to some reasons) as per the time frame of the journal. All peer reviewers must maintain a strict and perpetual confidentiality for the content of all manuscripts under their review and for any related correspondences with the journal editorial team. Reviewers must not share any part of the manuscript with a third party or discuss its content with the authors of the manuscript or any other person. Reviewers must not plagiarize or cite any of the contents of a manuscript before the manuscript has been formally published. Reviewers will decline participation in the peer review process for any manuscript if a conflict of interest exists, including interests related to the manuscript’s authors, personal interests, or academic or economic interests. If a conflict of interest becomes apparent during the peer review process, the reviewer must inform the Editorial Office immediately. The following reasons are adequate, alone or in combination, for rejection of a manuscript for publication: (1) The scientific content does not correspond to the journal’s aims and scope; (2) The research is not reasonably designed and the data are inadequate to support proper explanations or conclusions; (3) Related work has been previously published and only a few new points have been added; (4) The article contains accumulated information that has been previously published, with only few technical improvements; (5) The article is expected to attract only a very small portion of the journal’s readership audience; (6) The article has been rejected previously and resubmitted without adding any new valuable content.

Editorial policy

Manuscripts received from Editorial Board Members will be screened by the Editor-in-Chief and sent to external peer reviewers. The Editorial Board Members, who submit manuscripts to the journal as authors or co-authors, will be excluded from publication decisions.

Manuscripts received from Editor-in-Chief will be handled by the other co-Editor-in-Chief or one of the Associate Editor of the journal and will be sent to external peer reviewers. The contributing Editor-in-Chief will be excluded from decision-making of his/her manuscript.

Editors are not involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or whoever relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Any such submission is subject to the journal’s standard procedures, with peer review handled independently of the relevant editor and their research groups.

Appeal

The authors have the right to appeal if they have a genuine cause to believe that the editorial board has wrongly rejected the paper. If the authors wish to appeal against the editorial decision, they should email the editorial office (Email: editorialoffice@vtejournal.com) explaining in detail the reason for the appeal. The appeals will be acknowledged by the editorial office and will be investigated in an unbiased manner. The processing of appeals will be done within 6–8 weeks. While under appeal, the said manuscript should not be submitted to other journals. The final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. Second appeals are not considered.

AI policy

Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by GenAI. Authors who have used GenAI in their research and the writing of manuscripts should provide an open, transparent, and detailed description of the use of GenAI (including the name and version of the GenAI tool, when it was used, how it was used, and the process of using it, and, if necessary, annotations for AI-assisted contents dealing with facts and opinions), and review of GenAI, following the body of the text, before the references, or in the method section (e.g., the authors have reviewed and edited the GenAI-produced content, and take full responsibility for the authenticity and accuracy of the content of this paper). It is recommended that authors submit and archive the GenAI-assisted sections (text, figures, programs, etc.) as supplementary material so that reviewers and editors can judge the accuracy, integrity,and originality of the paper.

Since GenAI cannot assume responsibility for the submitted content or manage copyright and licensing agreements, GenAI-related products and developing teams cannot be listed as the author of a paper.

GenAI cannot be used to write an entire paper or a significant portion of a paper (e.g., method, result and analysis, etc.). All content that falls under the category of scientific contribution or intellectual labor should be finished by the author. If the main content of the paper is completed using GenAI, the editorial office will handle it as academic misconduct.

Open access

VTE is an open access journal and all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution.

The journal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. Copyright on articles published in any open-access journal is retained by the author(s). Authors grant the journal a "License to Publish" for the article and identify the journal as the original publisher.

Using third-party material

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

A copy of the permission obtained must accompany the manuscript. Copies of any and all published articles or other manuscripts in preparation or submitted elsewhere that are related to the manuscript must also accompany the manuscript. The material should be sent to any of the two addresses given above.

Plagiarism

Authors must not use the words, figures, or ideas of others without attribution. All sources must be cited at the point they are used, and reuse of wording must be limited and be attributed or quoted in the text.

The journal uses Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts.

Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. Any published articles may need to be corrected or retracted.

Duplicate submission and redundant publication

The journal considers only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered.

Manuscripts submitted to the journal must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere. Authors whose articles are found to have been simultaneously submitted elsewhere may incur sanctions.

If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work. Reuse of the authors’ own words outside the Methods should be attributed or quoted in the text. Reuse of the authors’ own figures or substantial amounts of wording may require permission from the copyright holder and the authors are responsible for obtaining this.

The journal will consider extended versions of articles published at conferences provided this is declared in the cover letter, the previous version is clearly cited and discussed, there is significant new content, and any necessary permissions are obtained.

Redundant publication, the inappropriate division of study outcomes into more than one article (also known as salami slicing), may result in rejection or a request to merge submitted manuscripts, and the correction of published articles. Duplicate publication of the same, or a very similar, article may result in the retraction of the later article and the authors may incur sanctions.

PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

The uniform requirements and specific requirement are summarized below. Before submitting a manuscript, contributors are requested to check for the latest instructions available.

The journal accepts manuscripts written in American English. The Word Template provides the correct layout and formatting for you to use in your submission.

Types of Manuscripts

Type	Text Word Guideline*	Abstract Word Guideline	Figure/Table Guideline	Reference Guideline
Original article	No less than 5,000	Less than 400 words, unstructured	Each figure/table should be numbered and cited in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e., Table 1, 2, 3, etc.). Titles for tables should appear above the table, titles for figures should appear below the figure. Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) to reproduce figures or tables that have previously been published elsewhere.	List references in alphabetical order according to APA style. Each reference listed should be cited in the body of the text. Any in press articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers’ assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office. The number of references is no less than 30.
Review article	No less than 6,000	Less than 400 words, unstructured	As above	No less than 30 references
Case study	The main text should be 3000-5000 words	Optional	As above	Less than 20 references
Editorial	Less than 5,000 words	No abstract	As above	Less than 20 references
Perspective	Less than 5,000 words	No abstract	As above	Less than 20 references
Letter	Less than 3,000 words	No abstract	As above	Less than 20 references
Comment	Less than 3,000 words	Optional	As above	-
Rapid communication	Less than 3,000 words	Optional	As above	-

 

Original articles:

These should focus on original research in professions, technology, and education, emphasizing scientificity, innovation, and cutting-edge approaches. The main text should be more than 5,000 words; the abstract should be less than 400 words; and at least 30 references should be included.

Review articles:

These are comprehensive reviews and analyses of the existing literature on careers, technology, and education that provide integrated findings. The main text should be at least 6,000 words; the abstract should be less than 400 words; and a minimum of 30 references should be cited.

Case studies:

These are reports on new discoveries and important cases in the fields of professions, technology, and education. The main text should not exceed 3,000 words; and a maximum of 20 references should be used; an abstract is optional.

Editorials:

These provide viewpoints or commentaries on current issues or emerging trends in professions, technology, and education, usually written by editors or experts. The main text should be less than 5,000 words; and a maximum of 20 references should be included; no abstract is required.

Perspectives:

Articles that advance a particular viewpoint will be considered Perspectives, but they must acknowledge alternate views. Perspectives should be written within the context of an informed consideration of the state of the art of the topic. Views should be defended with published literature to the extent possible. The main text should be less than 5,000 words; and a maximum of 20 references should be included; no abstract is required.

Letters:

Information of a high interest to the community and information on other pertinent subjects should be submitted as a Letter. Letters are expected to provide substantive comments on papers published in the journal within the previous 6 months or briefly report a case or research results, with a word limit of less than 3,000 and a maximum of 20 references; no abstract is required.

Comments:

These consist of brief comments, feedback, discussion on career, technology, and education topics, or in-depth critical analyses of specific research, articles, or trends in professions, technology, and education, with a minimum word count of 3,000; an abstract is optional.

Rapid communications:

It is suitable for recording the results of complete small investigations or giving details of new models or hypotheses, innovative methods, techniques, creative models etc., The style of main sections need not conform to that of full-length papers.

Thematic papers: apprenticeship:

These are peer-reviewed papers from the 9th International Network for Innovative Apprenticeships (INAP) Conference 2025, with the theme "Apprenticeships: Future Global Trends." The articles are of the type Rapid Communication.

Citation practices

You must avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation or pre-arrangements among author groups to inappropriately cite each other’s work, as this can be considered a form of misconduct called citation manipulation. Read the COPE guidance on citation manipulation.

Please ensure that the references you cite are relevant and provide a fair and balanced overview of the current state of research or scholarly work on the topic. Your references should not be unfairly biased towards a particular research group, organization or journal.

List references in alphabetical order according to APA style. Each reference listed should be cited in the body of the text, and citations to each text should be listed in the references section.

Articles in Journals

Al Otaiba, S., Connor, C. M., Folsom, J. S., Greulich, L., Meadows, J., & Li, Z. (2011). Assessment data-informed guidance to individualize kindergarten reading instruction: Findings from a cluster-randomized control field trial. The Elementary School Journal, 111(4), 535–560. https://doi.org/10.1086/659031

Books and other monographs

Personal author(s): Parija, S. C. (2008). Textbook of Medical Parasitology. All India Publishers and Distributors.

Chapter in a book: Mcdonalds, A. (1993). Practical methods for the apprehension and sustained containment of supernatural entities. In G. L. Yeager (Ed.), Paranormal and occult studies: Case studies in application (1^st ed., pp. 42-64). OtherWorld Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000132-000

Electronic sources

Magi, T. (2019, July 24). Business research assistant. University of Vermont Libraries. Retrieved November 19, 2019, from http://researchguides.uvm.edu/business

Newspaper article

Feder, B. J. (2002, July 18). I.B.M. beats forecasts but with signs of weakness. The New York Times, C1.

Thesis

Schachar L. M. Financing the Future: The Emerging Role of Income Share Agreements in Higher Education. University of Pennsylvania (Dissertation). 2019.

Non-English references (Translate the title into English and mark it in square brackets)

Liu, H. Q., & Liu, L. Q. (2021). [Characteristics and directions of coordinated development between vocational education and general education of upper secondary education]. Vocational and Technical Education, 42(9), 33-37. https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1008-3219.2021.09.006

Checklist: What to include

Author details

All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript (which will be anonymized/hidden when the manuscript is sent to peer review). At least one author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address and ORCiD normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an "Acknowledgements" section.

Author Contributions

Generally, the journal follows CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) rule. Journals mandating CRediT will enable authors to provide information on submission, allowing for detailed information about individual contributions to the work. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that contributions of all authors are correct. It is expected that all authors will have reviewed, discussed and agreed to their individual contributions as shared by the submitting author. The authors’ contribution statement will be published with the final article and should accurately reflect contributions to the work.

An example of an Authors’ Contribution statement:
Author 1 name: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software. Author 2 name: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Author 3 name: Visualization, Investigation. Author 4 name: Supervision. Author 5 name: Software, Validation. Author 6 name: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

For more information, please see the taxonomy website: https://credit.niso.org/

Funding details

A financial disclosure section is part of the submission process and must be completed by each author at first revision. You are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated. This information is for review by the Editors but will be published if relevant to the content of the accepted manuscript.

Ethics approval

Research involving human participants, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A clear statement, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in the method part of all manuscripts reporting such research. If authors declared that his study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, and this exemption should also be stated in the proper part of the manuscript. Editors may contact authors for further information and documentation to support this, it should be made available to the Editor on request. And editors have the right to reject manuscripts if they consider the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. The editors may also contact the ethics committee for further information, if necessary.

Retrospective ethics approval: If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the manuscript for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor's discretion.

Consent to participate

For all research involving human participants, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the declaration part of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

All authors must disclose any conflict of interest. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Details must be included at the end of your manuscript and in a file that must be uploaded on submission. If there are no conflicts of interest then please state this: The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

Data availability statements

Data availability statements are required for all articles published in VTE. During the peer review and editorial decision process, authors can be asked to share existing datasets or raw data that have been analyzed in the manuscript, and whether they will be made available to other researchers following publication. Authors will also be asked for the details of any existing datasets that have been analyzed in the manuscript.

Tables

• Tables should be self-explanatory and should not duplicate textual material.
• Number tables, in Arabic numerals, consecutively in the order of their first citation in the text and supply a brief title for each.
• Place explanatory matter in footnotes, not in the heading.
• Explain in footnotes all non-standard abbreviations that are used in each table.
• Obtain permission for all fully borrowed, adapted, and modified tables and provide a credit line in the footnote.
• Tables with their legends should be provided at the end of the text after the references. The tables along with their number should be cited at the relevant place in the text

Illustrations (Figures)

• Upload the images in JPEG format. 
• Figures should be numbered consecutively according to the order in which they have been first cited in the text.
• Labels, numbers, and symbols should be clear and of uniform size. The lettering for figures should be large enough to be legible after reduction to fit the width of a printed column.
• Symbols, arrows, or letters should contrast with the background and should be marked neatly with transfer type or by tissue overlay and not by pen.
• Titles and detailed explanations belong in the legends for illustrations not on the illustrations themselves.
• When graphs, scatter-grams or histograms are submitted the numerical data on which they are based should also be supplied.
• The photographs and figures should be trimmed to remove all the unwanted areas.
• If photographs of individuals are used, their pictures must be accompanied by written permission to use the photograph.
• If a figure has been published elsewhere, acknowledge the original source and submit written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the material. A credit line should appear in the legend for such figures.
• Legends for illustrations: Type or print out legends for illustrations using double spacing, with Arabic numerals corresponding to the illustrations. When symbols, arrows, numbers, or letters are used to identify parts of the illustrations, identify and explain each one in the legend.
• Final figures for print production: Send sharp, glossy, un-mounted, color photographic prints, with height of 4 inches and width of 6 inches at the time of submitting the revised manuscript. Print outs of digital photographs are not acceptable. If digital images are the only source of images, ensure that the image has minimum resolution of 300 dpi or 1800 x 1600 pixels in TIFF format. The Journal reserves the right to crop, rotate, reduce, or enlarge the photographs to an acceptable size. 

FABRICATION AND FALSIFICATION

The authors of submitted manuscripts or published articles that are found to have fabricated or falsified the results, including the manipulation of images, may incur sanctions, and published articles may be retracted.

CORRECTIONS AND RETRACTIONS

In line with the journal’s policy, corrections to, or retractions of, published articles will be made by publishing a Correction or a Retraction note bidirectionally linked to the original article.

Changes to published articles that affect the interpretation and conclusion of the article, but do not fully invalidate the article, will, at the Editor(s)’ discretion, be corrected via publication of a Correction that is indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article.

On rare occasions, when the interpretation or conclusion of an article is substantially undermined, it may be necessary for published articles to be retracted. The journal will follow the COPE guidelines in such cases. Retraction notices are indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article. The original article is watermarked as retracted and the title is amended with the prefix “Retracted article:”.

PERMANENT ARCHIVE

To ensure long-term digital preservation, all the published articles will be archived on Portico platform.